On Friday the 27th I had the pleasure of seeing Veronica Falls play the Norwich art centre. I'm always looking to see good gigs and Veronica Falls have had some positive attention lately. I've duly noted their associations with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, a band I like to listen to very much. The four piece had their self-titled album out in 2011 which met a positive reception that ensures that future endeavours ought to be well promoted. For my part I didn't find my listens particularly memorable, but things can change on the stage. Live verdict after the jump.
First up were Broken Seas, a three-piece consisting singer, guitarist and drummer. Their offering was what I would chraracterise as heavy rock of sorts with some definite blues guitar elements. The absence of bass made the guitar and kickdrum more responsible for the low-end, something the guitarist was aided in by a digital octaver. They had good rhythm, I found the drummer most impressive.
Overall the performance was somewhat reminiscent of Queenadreena with maybe a smidgeon of the Dum Dum Girls. It was fun but a bit more melody would have been nice.
Fever Fever were next on the bill in the amiable environs of the Norwich Art Centre. There was a noisy start and out of it emerged a shouty duetting chant. The songs at times used Thrash style breakdowns as well as some able tremolo picking and, again, some Jack White reminiscent digitally dropped octave. The twin female vocalists were strong, mixing: singing, spoken word, rap and the odd scream. Again there were strong dynamics and good drumming.
It was fun but I felt a bit lost, there were cool riffs and all but it didn't quite seize me. Then again I don't have much form for listening to the kind of thing they do.
In the wonderful Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot 1843-1924, David Wondrich argues that hot music from America in this period, and we can see elements of this through the twentieth century and arguably now, depended upon two integral components. Stomp was the sense of drive that derived from a growing physical sensuality that compelled many musicians to hammer out their music and embrace musical forms like marches with engine-like repetitive beats and direct tonics.
Swerve, on the other hand, was the tendency to subtly vary the formula in order to generate interest. Blue notes, microtones, smears, syncopation--these and other peculiarities, often for good reason associated with black musicians, found in Ragtime, Blues and Jazz represent a gamut of avenues for variations. You could say that Veronica Falls were a clippity-clopping horse, the emphasis was definitely not on the swerve.
With drummer Patrick Doyle, singer-guitarists Roxanne Clifford and James Hoare propelled the vehicle forward with much strumming. From where I stood, bass guitar didn't seem to handle an awful lot of rhythm duty. The vocal duties were shared out in the band, with Hoare and Clifford each taking the lead at different times. The oft-commented upon C86, Glaswegian blah blah leanings are clearly present with regards to bands like the Pastels and the Vaselines.The reverberant vocal treatment (like on the recorded output) has a woozy and distant sound. Its mournful quality reminded me of Strawberry Switchblade, actually.
One of the 20th Century's most famous stomps is the snare and floor tom job from Maureen Tucker of the Velvet Underground. There were definitely echoes of the back beat here with the song "Come on Over" bringing to mind the swell of the VU's "Heroin"--in the intro, and then maybe some "White Light/ White Heat." There's a danger that this piece becomes a description of the readings made by the band of other musicians. While their closing cover of Roky Erickson's "Starry Eyes" is an apposite example of just that, it's not the whole story to call them some kind of record collector rock outgrowth. The stomp was done to good effect on songs like "The Box" and "Heart Beat." Pieces like the so-called kraut intro (on their set list), "Found Love in a Graveyard" and "Buried Alive" show a variety of textures at the group's disposal.
I was thoroughly entertained at the time but I wasn't completely sold on the idea so I didn't buy an lp. I'm glad I saw them as I always like gigs, the unpredictable elements of them and the serendipitous potential of support acts. It was a good show but I felt too drawn to cracking the code. Maybe that's some of the fun but it seems to feed in to the zeitgeist ideas of people like Simon Reynolds with his book Retromania that I'm intending to read.
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